The topic of style in McCarthy’s The Road unites the eight essays collected in Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Through close readings and hermeneutics, each writer explores “style as what negates, but also as what succumbs to, the entropic horizon of what, inexorably, is.”

Continuum have put out a book of essays on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, entitled Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. [Continuum, via A Piece of Monologue]

Not too long ago, I was briefly thinking of working on something to do with The Road. A series of circumstances prevented me from doing so. Which is just as well since now I can simply enjoy the fruits of others’ labour.

Oh hey, it’s time to play the Nobel Guessing Game again. Apparently, according to this article, Syrian poet Adonis is the frontrunner for this year’s prize. [via The Guardian] Tomas Tranströmer is in second, though I have to admit I think Tranströmer is the better bet.

As I’ve done for the past two years, I’m going to pick five. I got Mario Vargas Llosa last year, so I’m hoping to go two-for-two this year. I’m going to go for Cormac McCarthy (the USA), László Krasznahorkai (Hungary), 残雪 (China), António Lobo Antunes (Portugal), and Antonio Tabucchi (Italy).

Yeah, I pick the unlikeliest bunch, but hey, it’s not like the committee has traditionally gone for the hot candidates.

I was going to go for Enrique Vila-Matas and Nicanor Parra, but I realise how unlikely it is that a Spanish-language writer will win for the second year running. Oh well. Next year.

A panel of Cormac McCarthy, Werner Herzog and physicist Lawrence Krauss discuss the intersection of science and art.

Werner Herzog on Cormac McCarthy:

Well, a younger generation archaeologist who was very fascinating because he started his career as a circus man. And I immediately asked him, a lion tamer? No. He was a juggler in a unicycle. But very, very fascinating people there. And what is so fascinating that it looks as if an entire world was articulated and almost invented because the animals, they look realistic and yet they looked like an invention, something – a figment of our own fantasies.

And the same thing – and I would like to shift a little bit to Cormac’s work because he invents entire landscapes. He invents horses in a way we have never seen – heard them being described. By dint of declaration, Cormac McCarthy creates a whole landscape that has been unknown to all of us, even though it seems to exist like, let’s say, Faulkner and others invented and described the Deep South; someone like Joseph Conrad describes the Congo and the jungle and the mysteries.

And so all of us suddenly have literature here, which is not unprecedented because we have something of the caliber of your writing. We see it, for example, in the last two pages of “Moby Dick,” Melville. We see it in the best of Faulkner. We see it in the best of my great favorite writer of the 20th century who wrote, for example, “Typhoon,” “The Nigger of the Narcissus.”

“And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.”